Watch The Last Dance, a 10-part documentary series on Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls on Netflix via your Sky Q box - episodes 1-4 are available now
Tuesday 28 April 2020 12:53, UK
Broadcaster and NBA diehard Mark Webster reveals what he learned from the latest episodes of The Last Dance.
British fans will recall Mark Webster as the face of NBA basketball on Channel 4 and Channel 5 back in the day. These days you can hear him discussing sporting matters on talkSPORT 2 and talking music on Five Live on Saturday nights.
And rest assured he is still a big-time basketball fan. His documentary, 'The Making of Michael Jordan', examines MJ's sporting and cultural impact and his journey to becoming a billionaire phenomenon - you can hear it on talkSPORT 2 at 5pm on April 28.
Here Mark gives us his takeaways from the latest episodes of The Last Dance.
The beauty of The Last Dance is how relaxed - and sweary! - it is. That's is something we've not really been allowed to see from the NBA before. They are a smart organisation and they button down their men, generally speaking. When players are in front of cameras, they are representing the league. That was the league I was familiar with during the 1990s. Things are a bit more liberated when you see the Chicago Bulls players talking about their rivalry with the Detroit Pistons!
Seeing the Bulls sticking their heads above the parapet for the first time in those two 1989 Eastern Conference playoff series told a great story.
The clutch shot from Jordan over Craig Ehlo to win the series against the Cavaliers, it's footage you might have seen before but seeing it from different angles within its full context really added to the story being told.
And then you see the Bulls come up against Detroit in the Eastern Conference Finals. In terms of action, just to see that series reproduced was fantastic. The absolute liberties the Pistons were allowed to take! Seeing those close-ups of stone-faced Pistons coach Chuck Daly - a ringer for a Sopranos assassin if ever there was one - so crestfallen after losing a game in that series was hilarious.
In both of those 1989 series, you are seeing players on the floor who would later join the Bulls and help make them what they became in their 1990s prime: Dennis Rodman and John Salley (Pistons) and Ron Harper (Cavaliers).
If you were under the illusion that the Bulls were a pretty team who played basketball the 'proper' way, think again. The Bulls knew they had to be tough - and they took the toughest guys from other 'brick wall' teams (particularly division rivals) and made them part of their own make-up.
I wasn't around the game in mid-80s when Doug Collins came in to coach the Chicago Bulls. I associated him with being the Detroit Pistons coach in the mid-1990s and then reuniting with Jordan with the Washington Wizards in the early 2000s.
When you hear Jordan effectively eulogising Collins and his tenure as Bulls coach in The Last Dance and explaining how the coach 'gets' him, you understand the vital part he played in Jordan's ascent. Patently, he was the man who ignited what became the all-conquering 1990s Bulls - certainly in terms of freeing up Jordan and letting him become the player we now know. He also had, to a certain extent, a hand in making the trades and building the roster with which the Bulls ultimately won their first three titles.
I think Doug Collins gets forgotten a little bit and episode three underlined his importance to the Bulls' eventual dynasty. And I'll forgive his erroneous decision to wear blue shirts only to sweat profusely through them, which we all know is a terrible mistake!
Dennis Rodman was an incredible character but he was an incredible player too. My favourite part of episode three was when the director Jason Hehir showed Rodman, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson the clip of Jordan's reaction to Jackson offering Rodman a mid-season holiday. And the compromise was 48 hours in Vegas which turned out to be an arbitrary number! Jordan tells the story and he tells it well!
The beauty of that for me was it showed how extraordinarily delicate the ecosystem of basketball team - a five-man team - can be. That sequence showed the absence of the injured Pippen and what that meant, the emergence of Rodman and what that meant, the return of Pippen and the decline of Rodman and what that meant.
You can't hide on a five-man team like you can in football, where you can have a passenger. That doesn't work in basketball, not if you want to be an elite NBA team.
The dynamic between Jordan and Pippen surprised me, too. I always thought they were Siamese twins but clearly they fell out during the 1997-98 period where Pippen requested a trade (a period in which he was the Bulls No 1 contributor across multiple categories but was only the sixth highest-paid player on the Bulls and the 122nd highest-paid player in the league).
In those rough periods, Jordan was the glue that held things together. He was the greatest sportsman on Earth at that particular time but he was also an incredible team man. He clearly did combine the two. Work ethic and team focus combined with his own individual brilliance was all one thing and it had to be.
When I was making my own Jordan documentary, (my former Channel 4 colleague) Scoop (Jackson) said to me that time has altered our perceptions to make us think the Bulls had these symbiotic, perfect relationships with each other.
What Phil Jackson was always doing - and you saw this with the way he treated Rodman - was that he didn't just have one way of doing things. He had a series of ways to cater to the personality of each individual players.
Jackson was also prepared to fall out with Jordan on matters of tactics and personnel but it didn't matter because the only thing Jordan wanted to do was win.
Under Doug Collins, Jordan thought the way to win was for him to have the ball all the time and score all the points. What Jordan learned under Jackson was, with the emergence of Pippen as his "greatest ever team-mate", that he could get what he wanted without having to do it all himself all of the time.
Episode three showed us the liberation of Jordan under Collins and then in episode four the control of Jordan under Jackson - both were hugely important in his development. By the time the Bulls were going for their first 'three-peat' of titles, Jordan had become the complete player.
Mark Webster's documentary, 'The Making of Michael Jordan', examines MJ's sporting and cultural impact and his journey to becoming a billionaire phenomenon - hear it on talkSPORT 2 at 5pm on April 28
Watch The Last Dance, a 10-part documentary series on Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls on Netflix via your Sky Q box - episodes 1-4 are available now
